VANCOUVER, Wash. – The creative media and digital culture program at Washington State University Vancouver has hired Brett Oppegaard as assistant professor of media communication. He will take his post in August.
Oppegaard has had a long career in journalism in the state of Washington. He served as senior staff writer at The Columbian for 13 years. There he reported on a wide range of topics including sports, the arts, travel, government and crime. He has also worked for The Olympian and The Lewis River News. A graduate of Washington State University’s Murrow journalism program, Oppegaard cut his teeth at The Daily Evergreen, Washington State University’s student paper.
Oppegaard made the leap to the digital world in the mid-1990s as an early adopter of the web and later blogs. More recently, he has gained recognition for his work with mobile devices, particularly smartphones and iPads, as mediums for digital storytelling. His dissertation at Texas Tech University, where he has been pursuing his Ph.D., focuses on mobile interfaces and app design.
For the last two years Oppegaard has been leading a team of 20 scholars and artists to build apps and digital content for smartphones for the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. He is the author of Phase I of that project, a series of modules focusing on the lives of the Hawaiian workers who resided at the site just before the U.S. army took control. The project has been awarded numerous grants including the 2010 and 2011 Historic Promotions Grant. With CMDC faculty, Oppegaard has also been awarded a 91ԹϺ Research Mini-Grant and has helped generate a National Endowment for the Humanities “Start Up Grant.”
Oppegaard is not new to 91ԹϺ. He began his career at the university in 2002 as the journalism advisor to the VanCougar, the student newspaper, and has led numerous journalism “Boot Camps” for 91ԹϺ students. In 2008 he was hired by the CMDC program to teach courses such as Electronic Information, Information Ethics and Digital Storytelling. In his new role as assistant professor, Oppegaard will oversee the media communication minor, which will focus on writing for digital media.
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CONTACT
Dene Grigar, Creative Media & Digital Culture Program, Washington State University Vancouver, dgrigar@vancouver.wsu.edu, 360-546-9487